


Identity Politics

by psyche_girl



Series: Identity Politics [1]
Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012), X-Men (Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Chance Meetings, Crossover, Erik was Jewish before he was mutant, Gen, Loss of Innocence, Oh Erik what are you doing, Politics, The Holocaust, poor steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-15
Updated: 2012-11-15
Packaged: 2017-11-18 17:30:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/563607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psyche_girl/pseuds/psyche_girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three days after the Chitauri Invasion, one day before Yom Kippur, Erik Lensherr runs into a wide-eyed young American idealist at the Museum of National Jewish Heritage. </p><p>...Thus begins a friendship that results in international controversy, thwarted terrorism, embarrassing media coverage, and a very, very, very, very, very angry Nick Fury.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Identity Politics

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place in my headcanon alternate universe, where the events of the first X-Men movie (Erik's attack on the UN, etc.) take place just after the Avengers 2012 film, but X-Men First Class is still cannon. (Don't look at me; I have no clue how Charles and Erik managed to live so long either; put it down to the standard comics!timefuckery or maybe something special in the X-gene.) That means that Erik is currently the old, bitter, revenge-obsessed silver fox from the first X-film, and Steve is the traumatized blue-eyed innocent who just woke up from a 70-something year sleep. This is not a shipping fic, except insofar as Erik is and always will be hung up on Charles.
> 
> See end of work for more notes.

Erik has never liked the Museum of National Jewish Heritage. It is little more than a sap to the conscience of a stranger race and a stranger species, _Homo sapiens sapiens_ , and, worse, American _homo sapiens_ : those who turned blind eyes while his people were slaughtered. And yet he has decided to come back to America at last, to New York, a prodigal son, returning to wage a war of men and minds against the worst of American prejudice and American hate, and he is therefore limited in his choice of places to pay his respects.

(Erik does not let himself wonder whether he has chosen to stage his coming war of minds and men in New York precisely _because_ it is close to Charles. The UN meeting is scheduled to be held here in a little over three months, there are plenty of spare ruined buildings for a group of so-called terrorists to inhabit in the wake of the Chitauri, it is expedient, there is no reason to search for ulterior motives.)

There are shockingly few people in the museum – even now, only three days after the so-called invasion (Erik is scornful; he has lived through real invasion, real war, and these New Yorkers have lost nothing more than their rich homes and buildings) – it is still the evening before Yom Kippur, and he would have expected more from his people. Erik is mutant above all else, _Homo sapiens superior_ , but _before_ all else, he is Jewish. He might never have had his bar mitzvah, might no longer observe Shabbat, might no longer believe in a God who could allow for the kind of suffering and injustice he has witnessed, but at least once a year, on this high holy feast day, he remembers his people and he honors them in death.

...Not, of course, that these particular examples of the Jewish race are particularly deserving of honor. Nearby, two neon-haired teenagers are actually _giggling_ at the display of holocaust victims’ clothing, while their kippah-wearing friend has tuned out entirely, eyes glued to a flashing Starkphone. In the far corner, a blond man – the Reich’s perfect Aryan, Erik thinks sardonically – is staring at the map of concentration camps with a faintly constipated expression. Erik actually _prefers_ their blatant disrespect to the persistent shrilling of the housewife to his left, whose pseudohistory keeps interrupting his lonely contemplation.

“..now Hitler – _no_ , Joshua, do _not_ stick it in your mouth – Hitler was an evil man who wanted to kill all the Jewish people – I said _don’t_ , Joshy – Ruth, stop whining, I’ll buy you ice cream later – and set up camps all over Russia and Germany to kill them in showers, with acid, and he would have gotten away with it if Captain America and the US Army hadn’t saved the day-”

The idiot Aryan, who’d gone stiff and silent halfway through the woman’s shrilling speech, interrupts.

“Like _hell_ they did.”

The woman gapes, and Erik abruptly straightens, reaching around for nearby metal.  He wasn’t planning to kill anybody today, and the cleanup would be inconvenient (particularly should Charles catch wind of it) but as petty and shallow a memorial as this place may be, he will stand to see no bigot defile it.

“I _beg_ your pardon?” the woman snaps, yanking a drool-covered Gameboy away from one dribbling toddler and straightening to face the man with an expression of disgust.

“Three hundred yards,” says the Aryan, voice thrumming with repressed emotion. Now Erik looks closer – metal-sense brushing over the dog tags encircling the strange man’s neck, the steel caps in his boots – his face is not twisted and reddened with the xenophobic hatred Erik had expected, but with what seems to be genuine sorrow. He is staring neither at the housewife nor at Erik, but through them, at something a long, long way away. “That’s how close my unit came to Auschwitz. _Three hundred yards in the dark_ , in August of ’44, and we could’ve stopped, but we _ignored_ it, because we had our mission, and we didn’t know, I- God Jesus, I never knew, they _never told us_ -”

The strange man chokes, voice going scraped-raw in a way that sends uncomfortable familiarity shooting deep into Erik’s gut, “How could they not _tell us_ about something like that? How _could_ they keep silent?”

He sounds broken. Ah, Erik thinks, finding the source of the familiarity: this is an idealist. An idealist, who has just seen his rose-tinted vision of humanity go up in flames.

“So many people dead, _Jesus_ , Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanik – over 79,000 dead in Majdanik, women, children, and _Captain America_ didn’t save one of them. _80,000 people dead_ , and I never even knew, they _never told me_ -”

“I survived,” Erik says.

It takes a second to filter through the man’s consciousness, but when it does, Erik sees his whole body go still as a bow.

“I was there,” he continues, oblivious to the housewife’s fishlike gaping. “At Majdanik, during and afterward. I was nine years old when I was first brought in.”

“Sir,” the man says, face drained from red to white, taking a respectful step back. “I’m – I’m sorry you had to hear me say all that, sir. It’s not my place to…” He shuffles his feet, awkwardly, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides – his arms are still shaking, but he’s clearly making an attempt to rein in his emotions. To be respectful.

 _Interesting_.

With visible effort, the strange man straightens up into textbook-perfect military posture and looks first the housewife, then Erik straight in the eyes.

“Sorry, ma'am. Sir. Pardon me, sir, I'm... I'm very sorry for your loss.”

The tremors of sincerity running through the young stranger’s voice are wrapped in the exact same shade of sorrow as Charles’s eyes on that long-ago beach in Cuba, and Erik knows, with certainty like a falling coin, two things: that he absolutely should not get involved with this man, and that he is going to do so anyway.

“It sounds to me, son,” Erik says, feeling his way along the surface of the dogtags, careful, with just the edge of his metal senses, “as if you think that you were there too.”

Cpt. Steve Rogers, the tags read. ID number: US0041762. And in his rucksack, heavy over in the periphery of the room: a huge disc that feels like metal, but different – the particles all vibrating in unison, muting and dampening Erik's magnetic senses like white noise dulling the sound of sirens.

Erik’s first reaction is disbelief – it _has_ to be fake – and his second reaction is anger, remembering the slick-shiny glow of those damned propaganda ads with their pictures of sleek well-fed soldiers and gunmen, and his third reaction is vicious, savage glee. Anticipation spirals out like tendrils in his mind, plans within plans, drawing a glorious map of the future, red-and-white shield framed on TV beside a black mutant symbol, beside the soon-to-be-ruined UN meeting house: _I can use this man_.

“I think,” says Erik, calmly, visions of politics dancing behind his eyes, “that you and I should go away from here, and I should buy you a coffee, and you should tell me what precisely you remember about the war.”

He thinks for a second that Captain America is going to protest – to say something on behalf of the woman, now sputtering like a teakettle at the pair of them while child number two smears snotty fingers over the lower half of the display, or to deny Erik’s conjecture, to say ‘I wasn’t really there'. But instead he reaches forward and extends a hand for Erik to shake, Charleslike honesty beaming all over his young, stupid face.

“It would be my honor, sir. May I ask your name?”

“Max Eisenhardt,” Erik says, and smiles like a shark. “Tell me, young man, have you ever played chess?”

**Author's Note:**

> I would like to apologize for any inaccuracies and to anyone I have inadvertently offended. Erik's opinions are NOT my own, and no offense was intended to the Jewish people, the American people, the American amry, humans, mutants, museum-going soccer moms, or Captain America. This fic is deliberately written from the point of vew of a very biased, very unbalanced man. 
> 
> I have also never been to the Museum of National Jewish Heritage in New York, and know next to nothing about dog tags or military identification procedures. 
> 
> It is true that US leaders (and leaders of other nations) during the war made the strategic decision to prioritize the liberation of the Western Front over the destruction of the concentration camps, and concealed information regarding the camps (among other things). It does not seem unreasonable to assume that Captain America, concerned as he was with eliminating Hydra targets, which as far as we know had little to do with Hitler's program of systematic segregation and genocide, would have been left in the dark.


End file.
